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It’s fitting that The Beast begins with Léa Seydoux being placed in a green-screen environment. She appears before a director who asks her to react to nothing. Everything terrifying about her scene must be imagined in her head, clawing deep into her own dark fantasies. That’s perhaps the best way to approach this film, which dances around cerebral romance and the crowding influence of tech on our lives. There’s something here, but it requires much cocking of the head and squinting of the eyes.
Seydoux plays Gabrielle, a woman seeking a better job in a dystopian future of 2044 where emotions must be kept in check. To move up in the world, she must experience past-life romances (kind of?) to purge the most significant faults of humanity. An audience who is already existentially exhausted by the prevalence of artificial intelligence may be able to relate to this scenario, but only to a degree where we know all roads lead to a grim realization of mankind’s realization of technology’s dehumanizing demands. The ability to feel for Gabrielle’s different lives is built on this shaky foundation, where the dark route is advertised early.
Gabrielle experiences two different lives in her programmed visions. One vision was set in 1910 France, while the other was set in 2014 Los Angeles. Her love interest Louis (George MacKay) fluctuates between being a man she has an affair with in France and an incel who targets her in Los Angeles. Is Louis an elusive figure of her sexual fantasies from past lives or someone she may be able to disconnect with? There is an answer to this, but it almost feels like a footnote as the film chooses to swirl itself in the surreal of technology tinkering with our minds and the past. Love is contorted and construed as Gabrielle delves deeper into her psyche and learns the hideous nature of what comes from denying the most potent part of our humanity.
Bertrand Bonello’s nonlinear romantic drama spends more time sputtering around its emptiness than it does exploring the disintegrating bleed between human ambition and tech advancement. That line remains firm, as Gabrielle is more of a fugue state between realms. We get to know just enough about all three environments. 1910 and 2014 are briefly defined, but 2044 is a reality still trapped in the past. During Gabrielle’s off-hours from getting AI mentality tests, she gravitates towards nightclubs that favor the music and tone of the 1970s and 1980s. She also finds herself being sexually pursued by the android Kelly (Guslagie Malanda). Kelly offers a different experience from the simplistic robot doll of 2014 but serves a similar function. The mesh tech and romance grow further, especially with Gabrielle exploring psychics in 2014 via online pop-up ads that only complicate her process further.
The Beast seems to get lost in its AI satire to say anything meaningful about the disconnect between human romance and tech advancement. Perhaps Bertrand Bonello was hoping to find something in the continuous swirl of our conflicted psychological state, where it becomes hard to discern between the present we’re retooling and the past we’re recalling. There are some relatable elements here and there that are worth exploring. Still, Bonello’s direction treats this observation with an almost disinterested vibe, relying more on the audience to peer through the veneer of the uneven editing than bringing any of the more profound existential quandaries to the foreground. This film explores some unique ideas, but you’ll have to slap your extra-thick glasses on to find any of those greater questions littered throughout the pictures era-darting assembly.
